This is a sequel to My Name is Lucy Burton, which I read as part of my 2017 reading challenge. That was a year when I had categories of books that I was reading from and I can't remember which category this fulfilled.  I had trouble finding books to fill those lists the few years that I did that and started asking for recommendations, which is how I ended up ditching that list and just taking recommendations for my yearly booklist. 
In any event, I did not write reviews back then, so I decided to reread My Name Is Lucy Barton after reading the first chapter of this book in order to remember the backstory.  In retrospect, this wasn't necessary to appreciate this story, but it did help connect many of the relationships in the book.
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And there are a lot of relationships in this book.  There are a ton of characters and the history between them is complicated. I often felt like I do when I visit friends in a close-knit community or try to join a new group of people who have been tight for a long time.  There are all these backstories that touch on each other and it is hard to keep up with how they all touch on each other.  This makes the details of the book hard to keep track of and sometimes I would be well into a new storyline before I realized these were the same people from another storyline. In many ways, this is the magic of this series. It really makes you feel what Lucy Barton's small town life with judgy, hurtful people was like--and not just for her.  Those who bullied her, those who were indifferent to her, and those who saw and helped her in big and small ways are all portrayed sometimes in sympathetic ways, sometimes not, and most often in both ways at the same time. 

There is so much depth here, so much hurt. Child sex abuse and sexual assault play prominent roles as they play out in families and relationships in ways that fill in the backstory for many characters. It is the story of kids who were bullied and kids who did the bullying and kids who were both bullied and did the bullying and how this plays out in their adult lives.  The emotion of childhood trauma, indeed sometimes of torture, is on painful display here--told with a perspective that conveys deep empathy for the damage done and the damage done to the people caused the damage.  It is heart-wrenching the whole way.

Recommend.

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I will preface this by saying that I am not a fan of horror, either in books or movies, but part of this project is that I read and finish every book and in this case, even though the bottom line is going to be a Not Recommended label, I have to say that I thought and talked about this book a remarkable amount for not recommending it to anyone. 

This book is about truly awful, abusive mothers with borderline personality disorders who torture and haunt their children, even after their death.  The lack of clarity about whether the haunting is real or a shared delusion as a result of the trauma these mothers inflicted on their children, step-children, and children-in-law, is truly horrifying and the book in general was, indeed, horrific. 

That said, the ending was so clever and the cleverness of the ending only adding to the horror of the story.  Although it is a full book, it had the pacing and feel more in line with that of a short story, including the way the ending of the story lands with the slow realization of what is happening having the feel of The Gift of the Magi or The Lottery. 

If you are a fan of horror, then this may very well be for you, but I can't really recommend it otherwise. I did give serious thought to a Not Not Recommendation, but ultimately decided that it really was just too disturbing for that.

Not recommended.

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Set in the 1700s, this historical fiction is set in the extremely remote St. Kilda on the island of Hirta in an isolated and rugged region of northwest Scotland.  The story takes place when a boat trip full of boy and a few men go hunting for a particularly coveted type of bird as part of an annual tradition.  They get stranded on what seems to be a small rock formation in the sea.  The dozen or so men and boys are hungry, cold, and homesick--left with virtually no resources whatsoever. 

As if the isolation, cold, and hunger weren't enough to endure, the fake preacher does serious harm as he tries to control the boys with fear mongering and shame, which is especially heartbreaking as the younger boys, who are maybe 9 or 10, are tormented by the separation from their homes and starting to lose hope of rescue.  His approach to imposing confession and attributing sin to the children is horrifying, especially when he insists on everyone shunning one of the children for seven days by not talking to him at all.  He also tells the youngest child that when they run out of birds to eat, they will start eating the youngest kids first.  The brutality of the story just keeps coming in waves, without the kind of breaks for meaning or connection that I would have wanted to see.

The story is reminiscent of Lord of The Flies in that it is a group of boys stranded on an island, but this is a significantly better book than that one. This is dark in a different way, as the adults do nothing to mitigate the stress for the children.

There is also a weird side story about one of the children whose mother has been secretly raising her as a boy because she was afraid to tell the child's father that she wasn't a boy when she was born. This fact becomes evidence while they are marooned and the whole way it is handled is just odd.  I have to think it isn't possible to know how that would have been handled in the 1770's, but the way the book portrays it just felt off.

Apparently loosely based on a true story, the ending is especially depressing.  I am pretty surprised it is classified as a children's book, too.

Do not recommend.

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It will come as no surprise that this is not a light read, but this reflection on antisemitism is both interesting and informative. I particularly appreciated how it is gives context to some of the commentary that I commonly hear from Jewish friends and read by Jewish authors. One thing that stood out to me in particular is the way in which many  progressive Pro-Palestine movements' boycotts of Israeli companies is perceived as antisemitic even as many leaders of those boycotts reiterate that they distinguish between the State of Israel and Jewish people.  The explanation in this book is really compelling and also reminds us how close in time we are to the time before the Holocaust when Germans were encouraged not to buy from Jewish stores. Her writing is both so well researched and so emotionally compelling that I found myself leaving each section with more compassion for and understanding of why somethings are perceived as antisemitic even when non-Jews might resist that description. 

It took me a while to finish this book, so was reading it about six weeks ago when the lethal bombing attack at the protest in Boulder occurred and I was impressed by how it shifted how much it impacted how I thought about the aftermath of that incident.  The core idea in the book that hate crimes against Jews are only given attention to the extent that the narrative can be used for a purpose that distracts from the horror of antisemitic violence to the benefit of others played out in real time as I was watching.  Almost as soon as the news broke, the immigrant accused of the bombing was arrested and charged, but rather than using the moment to focus on hate crimes and violence, the federal government arrested and deported his  wife and children, bypassing due process, thus shifting the focus from his Jewish victims and instead to using the event for political gain just in exactly the manner the book describes.  You have to love when a book provides such relevant insight and analysis even it was published a few years ago.

Recommend.

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A Holocaust novel, this book reminded me so much of the more well-known novel The Book Thief that I actually had to make sure that I wasn't misremembering that it was the same book--or at least the same author.  While The Book Thief was narrated by Death, The Little Liar was narrated by Truth.  The story is, of course, both incredibly depressing while also being a story of resilience for those who survived and it does a good job of highlighting the different ways the characters survived and what it cost them. I found the respect for the disparate impacts of trauma on different people to be relatively sophisticate and interesting. Some of the plot twists felt farfetched and the over-done theme of the non-Jews who, out of no where, stepped in to help was trite. The use of Truth as the narrator felt a bit gimmicky.  I had some sympathy for this, since it must be difficult to find a fresh way to engage with material this dark that will find an audience and yet I just found the narration scheme to be distracting.  I am likely in the minority in this respect, though, since I had a similar reaction to The Book Thief.  
 
Not recommended. 
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This was an incredibly painful book to read about the author's struggle with is son's addiction. 
How many rock bottoms can one family survive?  The writing is elegant and the author's love for his child permeates every word as he begins his decent into addiction, struggling with recovery and relapse. The book is a heartache from beginning to end, told from the perspective of a parent desperate to help, but powerless over their child's choices, but also over his own drive to provide comfort and protection for an addict caught in the narcissism and criminality of active addiction. Prepare to have your heart broken, over and over, and make sure you have the pace to reflect on everyone you ever loved who has known addiction. 

I also want to point out that this book also alludes to the unpopular and often ignored topic of how bad parenting plans impact the children who have to live them out--a very real reminder for separated parents and the professionals so write those plans for them.

Recommend.
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​This is not what I was expecting.  Not only was it no what I as expecting, but even when I was well into the story, things would happen that I did not see coming.  Twice in a short period of time, I was out walking and audibly gasp at the unexpected turn of events. It wasn't that I didn't find the story plausible, because once it happened, it was obvious that it could have happened that way, but I was just so surprised and I cared so much about the story and he characters.

The "women" here are the women who joined the military as nurses and were deployed into combat hospitals during the Vietnam War. From deciding to enlist to deployment to coming home to the many twists and turns of life after that, I loved everything about this story.  The complicated relationships, the struggles, the trauma, the recovery, the heartaches, and the way she writes about the constant, crushing sexism of that era was all so tangible, so well conveyed.  

I didn't realize this was the same author who wrote The Nightingale, which is an absolute all time favorite of mine.  If you loved one of those, I think you would love the other, even though they are quite different in nature. The writing is impeccable.  I can't say that I am anything close to an expert on either WWII or the Vietnam War, but I know enough to have been impressed by the amount of research that had to have gone into the books.  I'm focused on my 50 bookish friends list, but I loved this book enough that I contemplated diverting from the list to read more of her books.

When the book was over, I left wishing there was more.  Not an epilogue -- I didn't think that was warranted, but more of the details of the story along the way because the storytelling was just so good. The depiction of the friendships that weave through the book were so vivid and impressive.  I loved the ending.  I love the middle parts.  I loved the twists and turns and the heartbreaks and most of all I loved the women in the story.
 
Highly recommend.  
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This is a post-apocalyptic story from the genre I like to call Depressing AF Futures.  Like Station Eleven, Blindness, How High We Go In The Dark, and The Earth Abides, this book is bleak.  It was definitely well written.  The characters had depth and I loved their complexity and growth, but the storyline just brought one heartbreak after another.  It was another reminder that I don't want to stick around to see everyone I love die and everything I care about disappear.  I found my outlook on life to be significantly impaired while reading the book, unable to completely shake it from my mind.  Unlike Station Eleven, with its sudden world demise, this is a gradual fall into a post-civilization world where only the most hardened survivalists exist. It felt like it could really happen.  Being on the west coast, where one of the characters flees to while the protagonist stays behind in Florida, which is the first to succumb to the irredeemable changes in climate, it felt like this could be happening right now or next week anyhow, that this next hurricane season happens in the opening of the book.  The loneliness of the book, from its very beginning, is haunting.  Well written, I had a hard time putting it aside and yet I cannot say that I enjoyed it or was glad I read it.

​Not recommended.

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I typically do not love a graphic memoir by a celebrity that drops a lot of names and has that "tell all" sensationalist vibe.  That is especially true for celebrities who it is obvious are financially struggling and the books feels like a way to help them maintain their celebrity lifestyle instead of doing something akin to regular work.  This book had all of that feel to it.  But, I have to say that I was indeed significantly invested in his story as he described the abuse and neglect he experienced while being a child actor in Hollywood.  The sex abuse, his mother's addiction issues, and his father's exploitation of his career were heartbreaking.  His own use of drugs to manage the abuse he encountered was unsurprising and the train wreck was hard to turn away from.  I was surprised that the book is now more than a decade old.  His defense of Michael Jackson, although softer than his initial support of him in the wake of the initial waves of allegations of abuse, are still heartbreaking.  His portrayal of Corey Haim was similarly heartbreaking.  All of this was long before #metoo, but nevertheless a precursor to the harsh, harsh world of child entertainers.  

​Not not recommended.

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One of the best memoirs about grooming I have ever read, and I have read a lot of them.  Because Wood is a writer, was one in high school, and her abuser was her English teacher, she write detailed contemporaneous journals and letters at the encouragement of the teacher and which he kept.  When she left him, she took them. The result of this is that her depiction of the dynamics of that relationship are painfully vivid and provide insight and understanding about how she experienced the world and saw herself during the time she was his target. It is jarring, to put it mildly.  It is widely know that Lolita has been a handbook for pedophiles for the 70 years since it was published.  I know countless women whose abusers used the techniques in the book to replicate the control that Humbert Humbert had over Lolita.  What is unique about this story is how the teacher tried to get her to read the book and constantly compared them to the "couple" in the book, as if that relationship was something to aspire to.  It is powerfully written, providing insight not only for those who have had similar experiences, but for those who could benefit from some insight into this type of emotional abuse.  I feel confident in saying that if you have not lived through it, this is one of the most accurate depictions of the experience.  I really cannot recommend it enough.  This book just has not gotten enough attention, probably because it is an intense and painful read, but it is one of the best books on child abuse out there.

​Highly recommend.

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